Poll Question: Mar. 22, 2018

Mar. 20, 2018

4:20 p.m.

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Comments (3)

Only when Pedestrians are kept off the roads

The simple fact is that driverless cars have to fall back to a human operator that is awake and immediately aware of what just caused the "auto-pilot" to switch off.

One thing I have learned about "Automation" or "Robotics" is that especially when it does succeed "most of the time", the workers and caretakers around it get mentally lazy, out of practice, and they forget how to do the jobs that the machine was doing for them.

I have seen this in my work as an industrial automation engineer for the last 30 years.

If that is too hard for you to comprehend, then think of your calculator or Excel spreadsheet. Since you are not "carrying or borrowing the 1" every day, you WILL forget how to do such simple things as arithmetic on paper.

SE Wisc. Citizen more than 6 years ago

Initial Agreement

While your argument is perfectly reasonable and I think true, it is missing one crucial component: data. If data shows that (as an arbitrary example), people driving in agregate causes 100 accidents/ 10,000 people/year while driverless cars cause 10/10,000/year, then it doesn’t matter so much. Even if those driverless accidents tend to be more fatal on average, due to driver inability/inattention, there would still likely be less people dead and less accidents in general.

Now, I don’t know the numbers. Those ones were just an example to show that your point is not always and necessarily the most important issue. I suspect that as the technology matures, the ratio of driverless accidents/driver accidents will steadily decrease, and we will see a near absence of auto-deaths, compared to the present.

Already, there is a reason this headline is in a local newspaper in Wisconsin, because self-driving cars do not have many accidents. When’s the last time you heard about a car accident in Texas? Probably never, because regular car accidents are very common and not news-worthy. While driverless cars are still rare, if they were seriously flawed there would be a wealth of news stories pointing to driverless accidents and incompetence, given that rare in a country of 300+ million still means thousands on the road.

Jimmy more than 6 years ago

Yes. Imagine the impact on Drunk Driving

The sooner we allow driverless cars, especially "Up North" or out in the non-urban countryside, the sooner our people can patronize their taverns and still make it home after closing up the bar.

The Tavern League NEEDS this!

SE Wisc. Citizen more than 6 years ago